Anna Karenina eBook

They had just come back from Moscow, and were glad
to be alone. He was sitting at the writing table
in his study, writing. She, wearing the dark
lilac dress she had worn during the first days of
their married life, and put on again today, a dress
particularly remembered and loved by him, was sitting
on the sofa, the same old-fashioned leather sofa which
had always stood in the study in Levin’s father’s
and grandfather’s days. She was sewing
at broderie anglaise. He thought and wrote,
never losing the happy consciousness of her presence.
His work, both on the land and on the book, in which
the principles of the new land system were to be laid
down, had not been abandoned; but just as formerly
these pursuits and ideas had seemed to him petty and
trivial in comparison with the darkness that overspread
all life, now they seemed as unimportant and petty
in comparison with the life that lay before him suffused
with the brilliant light of happiness. He went
on with his work, but he felt now that the center
of gravity of his attention had passed to something
else, and that consequently he looked at his work
quite differently and more clearly. Formerly
this work had been for him an escape from life.
Formerly he had felt that without this work his life
would be too gloomy. Now these pursuits were
necessary for him that life might not be too uniformly
bright. Taking up his manuscript, reading through
what he had written, he found with pleasure that the
work was worth his working at. Many of his old
ideas seemed to him superfluous and extreme, but many
blanks became distinct to him when he reviewed the
whole thing in his memory. He was writing now
a new chapter on the causes of the present disastrous
condition of agriculture in Russia. He maintained
that the poverty of Russia arises not merely from the
anomalous distribution of landed property and misdirected
reforms, but that what had contributed of late years
to this result was the civilization from without abnormally
grafted upon Russia, especially facilities of communication,
as railways, leading to centralization in towns, the
development of luxury, and the consequent development
of manufactures, credit and its accompaniment of speculation—­all
to the detriment of agriculture. It seemed to
him that in a normal development of wealth in a state
all these phenomena would arise only when a considerable
amount of labor had been put into agriculture, when
it had come under regular, or at least definite, conditions;
that the wealth of a country ought to increase proportionally,
and especially in such a way that other sources of
wealth should not outstrip agriculture; that in harmony
with a certain stage of agriculture there should be
means of communication corresponding to it, and that
in our unsettled condition of the land, railways,
called into being by political and not by economic
needs, were premature, and instead of promoting agriculture,
as was expected of them, they were competing with